Introduction

Golem is a durable computing platform that makes it simple to build and deploy highly reliable distributed systems.

In server-based programming, the fundamental unit of work is the server, which accepts incoming connections, and handles requests by generating responses.

In Golem, which is a serverless computing platform, the fundamental unit of work is the worker. A worker is a running instance of a component, with a unique identity, which allows addressing specific workers.

Workers are similar to lambdas or functions in other serverless computing platforms, but they are far more powerful and expressive.

Worker Essentials

The fundamental elements of every worker include:

• Identity. Every worker has a unique identity, which allows addressing specific workers.
• State. Every worker has state, including memory, environment variables, and file system.
• API. Every worker has a public API, defined by its component.

These core elements are discussed in the sections that follow.

Identity

Every worker has a globally unique identity, which is formed from the following elements:

• Component ID. Every component deployed on Golem has a globally unique identity (UUID), which is assigned by Golem when a new component is uploaded to Golem.
• Worker Name. The worker name can be chosen by you for each worker. If you do not need to address specific workers, you can also use a UUID for the worker name. The only constraint is that worker names must be unique within the scope of their component.

The unique identity of workers allows them to be addressed individually, which unlocks many powerful patterns for building distributed systems.

State

Workers are inherently stateful, in the same way that any running process is stateful. Workers have the following stateful elements:

• Memory. A worker has in-memory state, such as global variables, stack, and so on, which constantly changes over the life of the worker.
• Environment Variables. A worker has environment variables, which it inherits from component settings and any initial settings when the worker is created, and which may change over time.
• File System. A worker has a file system, which currently starts out empty, but which may evolve over the life of the worker.
• Status. The status of the worker, managed by Golem, is one of the following: running, idle, suspended, interrupted, retrying, failed, or exited.

State also includes something called the instruction pointer, which is not accessible in most programming languages, but which tracks which location in the code the CPU is currently executing.

API

Workers are running instances of components. Because components have a public API, which is defined by WIT, workers inherit this API.

To perform work, such as handling a request, you invoke a worker's public API. This process is referred to as invocation, and you can learn more in the section on invocation.

Worker Guarantees

Golem executes workers with strong guarantees. To understand these guarantees, you should read the section on reliability.

However, in brief, Golem provides the following guarantees:

• Transactional Execution. Workers are executed transactionally. Once a worker is started, it will be executed to completion, even in the presence of faults, restarts, or updates. It's perfectly acceptable to use workers for high-value use cases, such as financial transaction processing; or for implementing APIs that coordinate updates across multiple systems.
• Durable State. All worker state, including in-memory state, is durable, and can be treated as automatically persistent. This means that state survives failures, restarts, and updates without the loss of any information. Workers may treat their memory as a database, and use it to persist state indefinitely and across any number of invocations.
• Reliable Internal Communication. Workers can communicate with each other using their public APIs, in a type-safe way. Worker-to-worker communication is reliable, with exactly-once semantics, and can be used to build sophisticated and stateful distributed systems.
• Resilient External Communication. Workers can freely communicate with external systems, such as databases, message queues, and APIs. External communication is automatically resilient, with exactly-once semantics for systems that support idempotency keys, and at-least-once semantics for systems that do not.
• Indefinite Life. Unless forcibly deleted or failed in a way that is unrecoverable (e.g. corruption of memory in a C program), workers live forever, without loss of state or progress. This allows workers to be used for long-running tasks, such as background processing, or for implementing APIs that require long-lived state.
• Secure Sandboxing. Workers are executed in completely sandboxed environments, with no possibility of workers interacting with each other (except via their public APIs), and no possibility that one worker's failure impacts another worker's health.

Some of these guarantees are common across all serverless platforms, but others are unique to the durable computing environment that Golem provides.

Classic Serverless

Although Golem brings the power of durable computing to serverless, it is still possible to use Golem as a classic serverless platform.

This enables increased reliability and use of serverless for long-running tasks, financial transactions, and other use cases that are not well-suited to traditional serverless platforms.

Comparing Functions to Workers

Emulating Classic Serverless

Because Golem supports workers that run forever, each with their own unique identity, it may not be clear how to use Golem as a classic serverless platform.

To emulate classic serverless, you really only need to do two things:

1. One-Export Component. While WASM components can have any number of exports, when emulating classic serverless, you should only have one export per component. This export represents the event or request handler that you would typically have in a classic serverless function.
2. One Worker Per Request. When dispatching events or requests to your component, you should create a new worker for each event or request. The worker will handle the event or request, and never be used again.

To ensure one worker per request or event, you can create a random worker name for each request or event, and use that to dispatch the event or request to the worker with the specified identity.

Although the worker will remain available indefinitely, it will only be executed a single time, when used to handle the event or request. This allows you to emulate classic serverless behavior, while still benefiting from the durability and reliability of Golem.

Operations

Workers support the following operations:

• Creation. Workers benefit from automatic creation, which occurs when a worker is invoked for the first time. Therefore, it is not necessary to create workers explicitly.
• Interruption. Workers can be interrupted at any time, which causes the worker to stop executing. Interrupted workers can be resumed later.
• Deletion. Workers can be deleted, which causes all state of the worker to be permanently deleted. Deleted workers cannot be undeleted or resumed, and if invoked again, they will be recreated from scratch.
• Updating. Workers can be updated to a newer version of a component, which is useful for long-lived workers that can benefit from bug fixes or new features.

Details about how to perform these operations can be found in the CLI guide, the REST API reference, and language-specific SDK documentation.